As readers of speculative fiction, we are spoiled for choice. The book releases in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and beyond this year took us from crumbling colonial manors and secretive magical academies to empires on the brink of disaster, with alien archivists, mystery-solving vampires, and cosmic whales—and we are so lucky to get to read them all.
Below, Reactor’s regular book reviewers talk about notable titles they read in 2025—leave your own additions in the comments!
I had a hankering for a lot of cozy reads in 2025. I enjoyed them all, but one I wanted to highlight that I don’t think got enough attention is The Keeper of Lonely Spirits by E.M. Anderson, where a man who sees ghosts and was cursed to live forever (and looks fairly old to boot) finds love and a family while working at a cemetery in Ohio. Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire also arguably falls in this camp, though perhaps it’d be better to call it a delightful book rather than cozy. Same goes for Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle—the novella’s robots were endearing and gave me hope of finding joy in a dystopia.
The only book at the top of my list, in fact, that wouldn’t be categorized as cozy or cozy-adjacent is The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson. This novel was one of the best fantasy books I’ve read for a long time, and deftly balances interesting, complex characters with rich worldbuilding and more than a few twists. I can’t wait for the sequel to come out.
The Checquy series has long been one of my favorites: I’m always a sucker for a government agency dealing with the supernatural, and author Daniel O’Malley’s wry, snappy style is a perfect accompaniment to the ridiculous incursions the Checquy operatives have to put up with—shapechanging actresses, rampaging stegosauri, and a perfect fist-sized cube of granite in the Prince of Wales’s head. Although Royal Gambit is the fourth entry in the series, O’Malley keeps it fresh with a mostly-new cast of characters, some of whom are even questioning the need for the Checquy itself…
On the fantasy side, no one’s doing it like Emily Tesh. The Incandescent is a novel of hubris, romance and most of all the reality of being An Adult With A Job; unfortunately, our protagonist Dr. Saffy Walden, professor of summoning demons at England’s premier magic school, thinks she’s a lot better at employed adulthood than she actually is. Its characters are tangible and evocative (one of them I wanted deeply to throw out a window within paragraphs of him being introduced), and, as in her first novel, Tesh is incredibly skilled at raising the stakes. The Incandescent is just one book, but in 400 pages it accomplishes the energy and drive of a whole trilogy.
Once Was Willem is another standout on my list just for how grounded it feels in 12th-century England. There is magic in this world—enough to raise a boy named Willem from the grave, reshaped into something unnatural—but it’s filtered through the understandings of medieval Christianity and Augustinian monks, devilish sorcery and angelic miracles. A friend of mine called it “Seven Samurai but with monsters”, and, yeah. If that sounds good to you, go read the book.
Finally, I like to include a bit of nonfiction on these lists, because how strange the real world can be! This year my pick was David Baron’s The Martians, discussing the Martian “canals”—illusory straight lines crisscrossing the planet which seemed to expand and shrink with the seasons. Touted by the fervent Percival Lowell, they led much of the world to believe in life on Mars for a brief time before the theory came crashing down. It wasn’t just misguided science and too-small telescopes that drove the craze, Baron argues, but something more akin to religious fervor. People wanted to believe, and so they did.
Caitlin Starling’s The Starving Saints has the atmosphere of horror and the catharsis of epic fantasy. Gorgeously written and suffused with symbolism, this is a novel about hunger, loyalty, and betrayal. The king and his intimates are starving to death in a castle under siege. Divine figures appear at the gates. These figures are not the saviours they appear. Only three very different women—an excommunicate nun, a devout and loyal knight, and a dispossessed former noblewoman surviving as a castle servant—notice anything wrong. If they’re very lucky, they may survive.
Elizabeth Bear’s The Folded Sky is the latest entry in her White Space space opera continuity. Part thriller, part murder mystery, and part Big Ideas Space Opera Adventure, it has pirates, professional adults doing their best under stressful circumstances, really old alien constructs, and a star that could enter its final death throes at any time. Dr. Sunyata Song is a specialist historian, not a hero of the spaceways. But when push comes to shove, she’ll do whatever she has to keep people safe. It’s a hell of a good book.
Not since Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice has a book delighted me as much as Tasha Suri’s The Isle in the Silver Sea. Like Ancillary Justice, albeit in a sprawling, magnificent, Arthurian-influenced-but-all-its-own-thing fantasy fashion, The Isle in the Silver Sea is a book that takes apart the furniture and structure, the assumptions and expectations of the genre at the time of its writing, with a fierce and angry affection. Its concerns are life and stasis, power and transgression: a love story, a quest story, and a vigorous argument against monarchy. Resonant with tragedy and resounding in triumph, it’s a masterful book.
Honourable mentions to Melissa Caruso’s The Last Soul Among Wolves, Elizabeth Bear’s Angel Maker, Deva Fagan’s House of Dusk, Martha Wells’ fantastic Queen Demon, Emily Tesh’s brilliant The Incandescent, Katherine Addison’s The Tomb of Dragons, JR Dawson’s The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World, and Kate Elliott’s magnificent The Witch Roads.
Two of my favorite adult speculative novels this year are probably going to make it to a lot of folks’ best of lists: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones and The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar. Although these are very different books—Jones’ is about a Blackfeet vampire who torments a preacher with his afterlife story of killing and being killed, while El-Mohtar’s is a lyrical fairytale about two sisters who tell the patriarchy to fuck off—but both had me hooked. It’s been months and I haven’t stopped thinking about either. The craft level is off the charts, seriously, just, oh my god.
As far as anthologies go, As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories edited by Terese Mason Pierre and Signos: A Fiction Anthology of Filipino Supernatural edited by Tilde Acuña, John Bengan, Daryll Delgado, Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, and Kristine Ong Muslim are must-reads. Some utterly fantastic short speculative fiction by authors both well-known and new-to-me. I absolutely inhaled these anthologies.
I haven’t had as much literary fun in a hot minute as I did with Kat Hillis and Rosiee Thor’s Dead & Breakfast. Cozy mystery isn’t my usual reading fare, but this story of middle-aged married gay vampires having to solve a murder mystery while trying to keep their small-town B&B afloat was so cute. There’s a surprising amount of depth, thought, and social commentary. I can’t wait for the sequel!
I hadn’t realized how much I missed L.D. Lewis as an author until I read The Dead Withheld. Lewis takes on urban fantasy with her novella about a private eye who tries to solve the cold case of her wife’s murder. Ghosts, demons, succubi, and shitty men abound. My only complaint is that I want more! I want a whole series of Dizzy getting up to no good in San Guin.
As for young adult speculative fiction, you’ll have to wait for my Best of YA picks—coming soon! But I’ll tease you with a few of my favorites: Among Ghosts by Rachel Hartman is perfection, Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee had me in a cozy chokehold, and Costumes for Time Travelers by A.R. Capetta is all charm and heart.
My chosen favorites of the year, always difficult to narrow down, all share the word “epic,” among them. Some of that epic nature has to do with the length and breadth of the tale covered, of histories explored from monstrous, wondrous, or mortal perspectives. Others have moments of epic intimacy with beauty earthly and otherworldly, or horrifying brushes with the strange, the weird, and the uncanny. But all are epic in their pursuit of transformation, in using every tool at their disposal to inspire in others a changing of ways, a turn towards justice, reminders of how beautiful the everyday can be, and ultimately, the power of stories to transmute the human heart into a better, stronger, more love-filled vessel inside us.
The Antidote is a 1920s dust bowl epic set in Nebraska, and author Karen Russell brings her brand of deeply human and incandescently strange to a small town where devastation is the new norm, save for one farmer who cannot understand his fortunate turn. Memory, faith, family, and basketball braid together in a story that emphasizes what we’re capable of when we forgive one another, and hold ourselves accountable.
Good Stab, a Native American vampire, tells his bloody tale of life everlasting to a skeptical priest, more interested in converting the quote-unquote savage than understanding his role in the undead man’s history. Stephen Graham Jones never misses, and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter may be his finest work yet, as he brings to life the tragedy of Good Stab, and what it means to be that which America is most terrified of, “the Indian who can’t die.” A true, new horror classic that will be revisited for decades to come.
A story of a story, an ouroboros within an ouroboros—Alix E. Harrow has crafted her most compelling book yet in The Everlasting, the time loop of a knight and a scholar, and a love to outlast history itself. The less you know, the better. I had my heart ripped apart, page after page, and I would not trade that pain even once for the value of the beauty within it, nestled like a burning coal in the flames.
There are stories that sink into your heart like seedlings, and in The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar brought forth the blooms in all their shades and scents and verdancy—their thorns, too, because even happy endings draw blood. A story of sisters and song, heartbreak and heart-mending, and love in every facet of the word, love and magic, intertwined like vines upon the trestle, this is a new favorite of mine and only affirms my belief of El-Mohtar’s place in my pantheon of immaculate storytellers.
Special book shout outs include Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab, Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders, and Saint Death’s Herald by C. S. E. Cooney’s. For video games, I was absolutely blown away by Star of Providence, Blue Prince, Sword of the Sea, and Silksong, which of course was everything I had hoped for, and much more. Finally, RPG podcast Worlds Beyond Number wrapped their first Book this year for The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One; if you’re looking for a great fantasy story, let me tell you, that’s 54 episodes of pure gold.
There are years where nearly every book I read seems to be part of a larger syllabus, arranged by the universe or some minor literary deity in such a way that they spell out a broader argument, a trenchant commentary on our times and How We Live Now. 2025 was not such a year, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t at least some interesting motifs spreading their wings and making a compelling argument.
Punk Horror. As someone whose tastes were shaped by the Dell Abyss imprint during his formative years—which included a novel that shares a name with an especially influential hardcore band—I have long considered horror to be a genre well-suited to channeling anger at authoritarian, oppressive, or otherwise stifling elements of society. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Black Flame, which I reviewed earlier this year, is a sterling example of this. It’s both an outstanding example of one of my favorite subgenres, the story of a haunted film, and a book that juxtaposes eldritch horrors with the damage self-loathing and an unsettling familial dynamic have done to the novel’s protagonist.
The Exalted Weird. We live in strange times, and sometimes the only way to make sense of things is to get a little phantasmagorical. Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child (translated by Martin Aitken) is a tale of 17th-century witchcraft and authoritarian politics, along with moments of transcendental escape; it’s also narrated by, well, the titular wax child, an omniscient being capable of seeing through time but also possessing a haunting sense of yearning. And Roque Larraquy’s The National Telepathy (translated by Frank Wynne) is a surreal period piece about a group of people given access to an ability that could remake human society for the better, who never quite grasp the utopian potential of what they have encountered.
The Subtly Epic. Initially, it isn’t entirely clear where or when Isaac Fellman’s Notes From a Regicide is set. There are moments where it seems as though we’re in a funhouse mirror reflection of our own world, akin to Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith—but periodically, Fellman includes hints of where this setting, where art and radical politics dovetail, exists in relation to the present day. Fellman doesn’t hold the reader’s hand through the process, and that makes for an acutely rewarding payoff as the novel develops. A very different reckoning with art, politics, and identity comes to the forefront in John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, which reimagines decades’ worth of superhero comics history and adds magic into the mix—both in terms of characters’ literal practice of it and of the powerful alchemy that emerges from great creative collaboration. These sorts of memorable payoffs can also emerge in shorter forms; John Langan’s collection Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions includes several works that tick this box, including one wholly unexpected combination of two different literary threads.
I expected to enjoy Freya Marske’s Cinder House, because I love her writing and a fairytale reimagining seemed like a perfect vessel for it—but I didn’t expect just how thoroughly crisp and tender this one turned out. It’s even cleverer and dreamier than I could’ve hoped. A taut novella with not a word out of place, this one hit heavy with haunting, longing, and the perfect sort of spicy magic.
While the conversation I had with Joey Batey about his debut novel It’s Not A Cult made me love the book all the more, it was already a definite favorite read for the year. It’s brilliant and strange, a tumult of anxieties and desires and the mundane shot through with the divine. His language is so lyric, specific, and inviting. I both couldn’t stop reading and couldn’t bear it ending. I can’t wait for his next novel.
The Villa, Once Beloved by Victor Manibo is my showstopper of the year, the book I’m going to gift to everyone, the sort of book that reads like relief—finally, someone said it! It’s horrific and hilarious, the perfect execution to a terrific premise, and Filipino as hell.
Margaret Owen’s emotional, heisty Little Thieves series came to an end this year with Holy Terrors, and wow, I haven’t loved a YA series like this since Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that this is the Into the Spiderverse of the trilogy (complimentary), so you’ll have to stay on your toes as you read. Owen is juggling so many elements it’ll dazzle and dizzy you, and perhaps necessitate an immediate reread (dommage!) to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Most importantly, she gives us a beautifully satisfying conclusion to Emeric and Vanja’s romance. I am obsessed with Owen’s decision to make Emeric a wee bit of a dirtbag in this one. Like, whomst among us hasn’t been a bit of a dirtbag in our young adulthoods? Never ever has an HEA been so thoroughly earned, by two screwed-up, imperfect characters. Packed full of murders, broken engagements, and angry gods, Holy Terrors was fully worth the four years I spent waiting for it.
Despite my many complaints about tropes and fanfiction and boring samey sex scenes, I do still love romantasy, and Maggie Rapier’s debut novel Soulgazer reminded me why. The protagonist, Saoirse, has always considered her foresight as a curse, and within her family, she’s very much the Bruno they don’t talk about—until her father needs her to marry to advance the family’s interests. So she runs away with a pirate (as you do). Raised to believe there’s something fundamentally broken and dangerous about her, Saoirse spends the book trying to find her voice and her strength, without becoming the kind of cookie-cutter badass heroine we’ve grown accustomed to seeing. She’s a normal girl, and her pirate love interest is an absolute goober, and it felt great to watch them navigate their struggles and imperfections as they fell inexorably in love. I can’t wait for book 2.
I tried to describe Tashan Mehta’s Mad Sisters of Esi to a friend and failed so completely that they sent me a whale emoji in response, and nothing else. If asked to explain what Mad Sisters of Esi is about, I will hereafter send a whale emoji and feel that I have done my best. But let me give it one more try, because I really loved this book. Mehta plays with ideas about how we tell stories, how we hold our memories, how we explore and understand the world beyond our homes, and most of all how we live in community. For me, the middle one of four sisters, it’s an extra bonus that all of this is wrapped up in stories about sisters and their complex relationships. Mad Sisters of Esi is a bewildering stunner of a book, cheerfully unexplained and wholly unexplainable.
Much of my best speculative reading for 2025 wasn’t “current”: I finally caught up to such fantastic books as Francis Spufford’s brilliant alternate history Cahokia Jazz, for one, and I re-read Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.
My sole Reactor review this year was a rave for André Alexis’ Other Worlds, one of the most enjoyable collections I’ve read in a long time. These are smart stories, mostly but not always speculative, that grapple with issues of identity, colonialism, responsibility, and art; they have lingered in my mind for months and led me to acquire a whole stack of Alexis backlist titles.
Finally, I’m now in the middle of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy, which concluded in October with The Rose Field. Since there was a six-year gap between installments, I don’t regret that I waited until all three were finished before I began reading. As someone who read His Dark Materials in grade school and re-read Pullman’s original trilogy as an adult, these books are a fine mix of the comfortable and the bracing; I don’t quite know where they’re going, but I can’t wait to find out.
Most of my friends and family could name my favorite book of 2025, since I talked to them about it constantly for a month: Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan. Anyone who would listen heard me gush about Kwan’s moody gorgeous prose and how her debut struck the perfect balance between tough climate realism and soft human hope. Now, even six months after I finished this story of a strange visionary artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for in an almost-underwater San Francisco, I’m still looking for new ears to fill with the words: Just read it, ok?
So many other books brought light to me this year, too. Aimee Phan’s The Lost Queen sucked me into a high school girl’s reckoning with her burgeoning power and hidden identity more than anything has since Buffy. (And y’all… I love Buffy.) I crave sibling stories, and Phan more than delivered with this retelling of the Truong Sisters. Every time I thought I knew what mythic twist was coming, the tale veered onto an unexpected yet perfect new path.
Then it’s always a boon when Charlie Jane Anders releases a new novel. Even better, this time she totally surprised me. I’ve come to rely on her work for deft magic systems and painfully truthful relationships. But a fully imagined 18th century novel within the novel? What a flex! What a delight! Byatt’s Possession meets joyfully queer magic realism: a chimera I knew never I wanted. Even if invented ephemera isn’t your thing, Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a book for anyone who’s ever tried to “fix” a parent and every grown-up kid who’s ever whispered wishes to a tree.
Speaking of grown-up kids, Caskey Russell’s indigenous epic The Door on the Sea got me out of a major reading slump. I came for the raven who describes all humans as varying types of “turd” (this may sound like a limited vocabulary, but no—he gets creative) and stayed for the daydreaming youth who must captain a canoe full of unusual warriors in pursuit of a seductively dangerous weapon. A straightforward adventure tale that is nonetheless morally complex is rarer than you might think. I couldn’t put it down.
And while it’s not speculative, Jeanne Thornton’s gritty love letter to queer gamers growing up in the ’90s, A/S/L, broke my brain. In a good way. I think? I did have to take a break from reading it when I realized the interior of my mind felt crowded: me plus the three trans women at the center of the novel. Perhaps I relate a little too deeply to folks using video game mechanics as a framework for understanding our puzzling, violent, and beautiful world.
Karen Russell’s The Antidote, published this April was Pulitzer winner Russell’s first novel in over a decade, and it did not disappoint. It’s a haunting, tender story set in Nebraska in 1935, after Black Sunday, when one of the worst dust storms in America’s recorded history destroyed multiple towns in the Midwest. The story focusses mainly on three women, all witches, one way or another. The Antidote herself is a prairie witch, a woman capable of siphoning people’s memories out of their minds and returning them later, without actually knowing the stories she has stored within herself. After Black Sunday, the Antidote loses her ability and has to hire an assistant to help her fool the townspeople. Asphodel, the young female assistant is certain she could be a prairie witch too, but right now she’s the captain of her basketball team, and she will do anything to get her girls to their games. Meanwhile Cleo is a black woman photographer whose lens captures more than just images of Midwestern life. She may set up her pawn shop camera for a perfectly ubiquitous shot, but in the darkroom the exposures tell an entirely different story. It’s as if time weaves a different narrative for Cleo’s camera, and the images she prints are a strange surreal mix of what could be an alternate future for the land. Or is it the past?
Alongside the stories of these women (and what makes them witches), is the story of America in the 1930s, the climate damage caused by ruthless capitalist colonisation of a land previously venerated and kept safe by Native tribes. Russell draws elegant parallels between different sets of marginalised people, and explores the ecological losses caused by ethnic cleansing in what is a poetic look at how much false history can be created by those in power, and how the worst of history can, and does repeat itself.
Augustina Bazterrica’s 2017 novel Tender is the Flesh left such a huge impact on most readers (whether negative or positive really depends on how much you can handle), that it was always going to be a tough act to follow. Her next novel The Unworthy is an entirely different beast, but is just as powerful a look at some of the themes present in Tender in the Flesh, too. A group of women are ruled over by the Superior Sister and “Him” in a convent that appears safe from the dangers of an unknown climate apocalypse. The women are controlled by an extreme focus on violent religiosity, punishment viewed as piety, and absolute cult-like indoctrination. There is a lot that is left unsaid; Bazterrica is great at leaving things to the reader’s imagination. That she does not pander to the reader in any way is a huge part of the charm of her writing. There are many banks artfully left, that we are expected to fill in.
The narrative is a first person diary entry, a secret, clandestine act, which means it is told by an unreliable narrator whose very act of writing is an act of rebellion. It’s an engaging read in every way, intimate because it is epistolary, and jarring because enough is suggested to keep the reader on their toes, imagining the very worst. The book asks questions about power, about control and about humanity, questions Bazterrica is not going to provide answers to. That would be much too easy.
Mona Awad gave us the deranged and delightful Bunny in 2019, and this year we were served up the equally batty sequel We Love You, Bunny, in which Awad gleefully explores the liminal space between beauty and violence, when it comes to the creation of true art. We go back to the college campus setting of the first novel, and this time we hear from all the other bunnies, the girls who we didn’t meet firsthand in the first novel, the ones who created Franken-men from bunnies, intent and desire.
The grotesque surrealism present in the first novel is expanded on here, with plenty of strange hallucinatory style narration used, especially when Awad takes on the perspective of one of the bunny-boys. The whole thing is a wild riotous romp, full of self-aware humour and cleverness, with little left as subtext. This is a very meta, self-referential novel that does not hold back on flippancy or sarcasm about creativity, elitist higher education or modern society. It’s also just a whole lot of mad fun, and we could all do with some of that.
There’s no doubt that Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World remains king of weirdo mountain on my book list this year—a delightfully upsetting story animated by Murata’s signature deadpan style. I love the way she takes a common taboo, reimagines the whole thing through a totally different lens, and presents it to us on a platter like an unignorable cryptid head at the world’s most uncomfortable banquet.
Another stellar read this year was Theodora Goss’ anthology Letters From an Imaginary Country, which was a fantastic, rambling journey through semi-autobiographic fairytale and fantasy, with layers and caches of intertextual treasure to enjoy along the way (my favorite was “Child-Empress of Mars,” a brilliantly funny take on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ work with bite and brains).
I also read Waterblack—the final entry in the Cities of the Weft trilogy by Alex Pheby—not the strongest of the three, but I like to think about the trilogy as a single entity in terms of how it provokes and challenges the reader, for better or worse, to give their all to such a vast and formidable text.
Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis is a collection of short stories that is surreal, nostalgic, and one that will leave you both laughing and crying. Written over a span of twenty-five years and most for in-person readings, the stories are punchy and range in emotional resonance with a lot of room for reader reflection and interpretation. I love how Park plays with form, and if you are a ’80s or ’90s kid, you would appreciate the trip down memory lane.
Akwaeke Emezi has established themselves as a genre-hopping writer and they are damn good at it, but I really believe they shine the brightest in the young adult genre. My belief was once again validated with Sọmadịna, a YA fantasy novel set in a magical West African world about a teen girl on a quest to find her missing twin, Jaiyeki, as she learns to navigate her immense powers. Although this book is for young adults, Emezi explores themes like generational trauma, identity, and belonging that anyone, no matter your age or background, could relate to.
Luminous by Silvia Park is a sci-fi literary fiction that is set in a reunified Korea where robots are integrated into humans’ daily lives, as nannies, boyfriends, and even children. In the book, Park examines the complexities and boundaries of identities—what we physically look like, what gender we identify with, where we are from, and who we love—and how they all begin to blur. The integration of robots with humans and how they/we evolve is thought-provoking and will lead you into deep philosophical questions about humanity and the lengths we will go to ensure our survival and salvation.
Does anyone else feel like they just didn’t read this year? No? Just me? I mean, my spreadsheet says otherwise, but when I look back at 2025 books, I feel like I read about four of them. If that’s true, though, thankfully they’re all pretty great. (And there are still some I’ve not yet gotten to: I have high hopes for Sarah Hall’s Helm and Bethany Jacobs’ This Brutal Moon).
The SFF book of the year for me is still Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar. It’s one of those books that sounds on paper like it shouldn’t work: animal-themed factions and a competition for the crown and a whole lot of secondary mysteries and a pedantic protagonist who’s in over her head and about seven more major things stuffed into the book’s copious pages—but it works because Hodgson does it just right. It’s a massive tome that reads like a charm, speedy, immersive, funny, occasionally sexy, cleverly plotted, cleanly drawn. The revelation of who, exactly, is narrating the story is a magic trick that worked on me; the careful balance between cleverness and strength that the story requires of its characters is reflected in the telling. It’s smart! It’s fun! It’s voicey and delicious! I still can’t believe she pulled off that brazen 50-pages-in character switch! Ugh, I need book two like yesterday.
Strangely, or not strangely, it’s been a year for ghosts: Rachel Hartman’s Among Ghosts, a loving, inventive, affecting story set in the same world as her Seraphina series; and Bora Chung’s Midnight Timetable, a novel in stories set at an Institute that tends to haunted objects. You could look at Kathleen Jennings’ Honeyeater as a sort of ghost story, too—an Australian Gothic tale of a small town and its secrets, which simply refuse to stay buried. Wen-Yi Lee’s When They Burned the Butterfly centers on not ghosts but humans, Singaporean gang leaders, who act as conduits to gods and goddesses, but it has a haunted quality, too: the haunting of grief, the constant sense of loss, the feeling of moving from one world, one era, to the next, not knowing quite what’s coming.
But the book that will stay with me the longest isn’t SFF at all. Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This more than deserved the National Book Award for Nonfiction that it won earlier this month. El Akkad is a novelist making his nonfiction debut with a book that is about the genocide in Palestine, specifically, but is also about what we are willing to tolerate in the world, in our country, in ourselves. I genuinely don’t know how to summarize it, to talk about it, but it is short, fierce, angry, heartbroken, beautiful, moving, and—to use a word I am generally reluctant to use about books—necessary. I’ve seen El Akkad speak several times over the past few years, and every time I’ve come away with ideas and thoughts and beauty just bouncing around inside my head like superballs. The book has the same effect, with the fury, moral clarity, and power that comes from an argument, a rage, precisely distilled.
This year a number of retellings stuck with me, for how they weren’t afraid to reach deep inside the guts of their respective source material and wring out new meanings. Emery Robin concluded their Stars Without End duology with The Sea Eternal, which outdoes The Stars’ Undying’s space opera take on Cleopatra by interrogating how we log our personal and political histories—the truthful and the poetic license—once we’ve conquered the stars. Freya Marske’s novella Cinder House is not just Cinderella as a ghost haunting her home, it’s a bittersweet open letter for all of us still carrying various scars of pandemic lockdown and long covid. I’d also like to shout out a bunch of books that I just didn’t get to finish but that I can’t wait to curl up with over the winter: Fran Wilde’s A Philosophy of Thieves, Ilana Masad’s Beings, Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar.
As always, the SFF short fiction slaps. I discovered Tia Tashiro’s writing this year, especially the wry gut-punch of “Missing Helen” (Clarkesworld), about having to be the mature one post-divorce when your ex is dating your younger clone. I appreciated the gorgeous language of Catherynne M. Valente’s “When She Calls Your Name” (Uncanny) elevating an admittedly killer elevator pitch into a lived-in, feel-it-in-your bones tale of longing from an unexpected source. And Amber Sparks’ “Your Life in Parties” (Short Story, Long) takes readers on a trippy, body-jumping unspooling of the narrator’s long existence hosting and managing others’ experiences at parties when all she wants to do is return to her simpler, happier celebrations; the very last moment took me by such surprise that I was suddenly bawling and so grateful to have read it.
Amazing recs as always! My TBR can’t withstand such a wonderful onslaught! 😸 I am wondering, though, why you are linking to Amazon instead of bookshop.org or another less problematic site? Either way, you’re in my top three favorite places on the internet and I can’t get enough! 👏
Thanks for the kind words, and the heads up–now that our wonderful production team has had a chance to take a look, the links have been updated to bookshop.org. Happy reading!!!
Wow, wonderful! Thank you so much! :-) I know a ton of work goes into running the site and I really appreciate the response!
Thanks for this great list! The few books that overlapped with what I read this year were standouts, which makes me think there’s a good chance I’ll enjoy them all. I’ve already picked up 2 and filled up my tbr list with more.
The Keeper of Lonely Spirits by E.M. Anderson was absolutely my book of the month for April, i loved it so much <3
The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson was fabulous and i’m so excited for the sequel!
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh omg, i need more in this world PRONTO!
When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-Yi Lee further solidified Lee as one of my Must Read authors.
Putting in my top 5 from 2025:
Dissolution by Nicholas Binge
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson
Outlaw Planet by M. R. Carey
I really loved The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis! Plus the latest entry in Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series is always a wonderful time. But I’m finding that I am not hearing as much about the latest sci-fi books, specifically. I’m going to have to really reach out to figure what’s popular (besides Murderbot and Monk and Robot, always good options).
A great list of recommendations. A few i agree with, many on my TBR, and even a couple I had not yet heard about!
Great recs! I have to give a shout-out to Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Martian Conspiracy, fantastic like all the Lady Astronaut books; Gifted and Talented by Olivie Blake; and absolutely The Incandescent by Emily Tesh. And from last year, The City in Glass by Nghi Vo.